Tagged: Freedom

In rereading Bonhoeffer’s masterful Life Together(1954), my favorite book, I was again blown away by the passage quoted below, where, in discussing how Christians must “bear each other’s burdens,” he says that the reason that such bearing (or forbearing, or sustaining) is difficult is because of the other’s freedom, meaning that in all their particularities and needs and quirks and sins, that person – something completely real, outside of ourselves – makes demands on us and challenges our own freedom and preferences and selfishness. I think this is a basic but profound reality that sheds light on what makes all meaningful relationships – whether in friendship or brotherhood or marriage – so difficult at times. This same reality, however, is what can make them so worth it, because in testing our limits, as such relationships will often do, they broaden those limits to make us more loving, more patient, more humble, and stronger – in short, more large-hearted. This reminded me of another passage (below) that stopped me in my tracks: What C.S. Lewis said about marriage, based on his brief experience as husband to Joy Davidman, an American poet and writer whose romance with Lewis began over a series of intellectually- and literary-minded letters to the Oxford Don.

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C.S. Lewis, inA Grief Observed (1961), his devastatingly honest account of his spiritual and emotional agony following the death of his wife Joy:

“The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.” (19)

And from Bonhoeffer:

“It is, first of all, the freedom of the other person, of which we spoke earlier, that is a burden to the Christian. The other’s freedom collides with his own autonomy, yet he must recognize it. He could get rid of this burden by refusing the other person his freedom, by constraining him and thus doing violence to his personality, by stamping his own image upon him. But if he lets God created His image in him, he by this token gives him his freedom and himself bears the burden of this freedom of another creature of God. The freedom of the other person includes all that we mean by a person’s nature, individuality, endowment. It also includes his weaknesses and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us. To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept it and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it.” (101)

In The Meaning ofMarriage (Dutton, 2011), Tim Keller explains how rather than limiting your freedom, promising can expand and deepen it. Promising, he writes, is the “means to freedom” because “in promising, you limit options now, in order to have wonderful, fuller options later. You curb your freedom now, so that you can be free to be there in the future for people who trust you” (93).

Keller quotes Christian theologian and ethicist Lewis Smedes:

“When I make a promise, I bear witness that my future with you is not locked into a bionic beam by which I was stuck with the fateful combinations of X’s and Y’s in the hand I was dealt out of my parent’s genetic deck. When I make a promise, I testify that I was not routed along some unalterable itinerary by the psychic conditioning visited on me by my slightly wacky parents. When I make a promise, I declare that my future with people who depend on me is not predetermined by the mixed-up culture of my tender years.

“I am not fated, I am not determined, I am not a lump of human dough whipped into shape by the contingent reinforcement and aversive conditioning of my past…when I make a promise to anyone, I rise above all the conditioning that limits me. No German Shepherd ever promised to be there with me. No hom computer ever promised to be a loyal help…Only a person can make a promise. And when he does, he is most free” (94).

From J.D. Greear’s Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary (B&H, 2011), this is a four-part prayer aimed at saturating oneself in the truths of the gospel. As he says, “There’s nothing magical about this prayer. It’s not an incantation to get God to do good things for you,” but “simply a tool to help you train your mind in the patterns of the gospel. The point is not the prayer; the point is thinking in line with the gospel” (40).

Pray this consistently, and watch how God transforms you:

“In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less.”

“Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy.”

“As you have been to me, so I will be to others.”

“As I pray, I’ll measure Your compassion by the cross and Your power by the resurrection.”

Javier

I'm a husband, father, and a Christian, and I work in international affairs. I'm also a bibliophile. I mostly read books on theology, history, politics, and philosophy. This is where I share some of the best things I come across in my reading.